Devaluing the currency of sweat

The photographs of Sebastiao Salgado are striking both for their composition and subject matter. Salgado practises what he calls 'militant photography' and his subjects of choice are the working class, refugees, migrants, children and the landless. He documents the communities of the oppressed struggling to live under the punishing conditions imposed by global capitalism.

His photographs of gold miners from Brasil's Serra Pelada are astonishing for both their scale and their novelty. We are confronted with the unfamiliar; scenes of thousands of sparsely clad human bodies scaling the precarious walls of an open-cast mining pit with loads of ore pressed to their backs.

The sheer size of the endeavour is almost horrific, insect-like. Sweat drowns their clothing so thoroughly that the all but naked form of their bodies shows through beneath. There is little hidden about them except their personalities; these are revealed in Salgado's often humorous portraits.

The surprise which seizes us when first viewing these images is due to an aesthetic appreciation (Salgado's staple choice of black and white prints is significant) and a moral and cultural horror cum fascination. This stems partly from the fact that we occupy a radically different strata in the global economy.

More influential is the fact that depictions of this labour which is at the root of our local gold jewellery business are almost entirely absent from the international mass media. Saturated with images selected according to the middle-class bias of the global media, we are largely insulated from such realities.

It is easy enough to find an article and photo in a global business magazine concerning the executives who head the multinational combines which dominate the metals markets. Sleek and well-groomed, the suited capitalist stares out from the page as the epitome of status, wealth, and power.

Raw labour such as the miners' is conspicuously absent or thoroughly sanitised. This omission is the result of a deliberate selection that is profoundly political.

The art critic and author John Berger has written that 'photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.' What makes Salgado's photography profoundly human and provocative is that he carefully shows us the humour, character, and dignity of human beings amidst the inhumanity of their working conditions.

A trained economist who took up the camera as a more potent tool, Salgado has made a choice to depict the marginalised reality of global capitalism, just as Fortune chooses to depict that economic value is largely created by a transnational executive class.

The situation of the worker at the bottom of the value chain is their trade secret. It is a necessary fiction to sustain capitalism's moral respectability.

Users of the Kuala Lumpur LRT system will be familiar with adverts for whitening anti- perspirant. The marketing of this product plays upon a double anxiety. The desire for paleness and the desire for the appearance of composure in the face of physical exertion.

Both are part of a culture of disavowing the realities of life as an embarrassment. That on the one hand you were born with a certain tone of skin and it browns when exposed to the sun, and on the other hand, that human beings sweat as a consequence of physical exertion; of labour.

By implication, to be dark and to sweat is a mark of shame which allows the working class to be devalued both in terms of social status and as subjects of sexual desire. The adverts and the whitening anti-perspirant promise a means to transcend the status of being working class by adopting the physical characteristics associated with the ruling leisured class.

Sweating is a fundamental condition of human life, but like the working class itself, our popular and political cultures have attempted to conceal the fact that it forms a fundamental condition of society.

In fact, like a body in a murder mystery, the efforts of the sweating, working class have undergone a 'curious disappearance' in the public realm through the diligent application of a political anti-perspirant.

Cast your mind over your experience of consuming the popular mass media. Newspapers, television, and advertisements rarely if ever depict industrial, rural or white-collar labour in a dignified manner.

The most common images of sweat are in sports, but these are professional athletes and are paid quite well to sweat. They are accorded a privileged position in popular culture; they can be heroes and heroines because of their labour. It is a recognition seldom given to workers.

Dignified representations of labour are largely absent from TV, newspapers, magazines and the political discourse of the nation. Workers are not shown as people with power, character, humour and the tenacity to fight in order to overcome their exploitation. Neither is the sheer drudgery of work acknowledged; only a duty to the national economy.

Depictions of Malaysian labour are often anonymous. Working individuals are shown as faceless sub-units of a greater economic narrative. What is shown is often sterile and clean. Not a drop of perspiration.

It is as if there is something obscene about sweating to earn one's living that it must be thoroughly hidden from public view, like a body in a murder mystery, or a political scandal.

Yet as anyone who takes public transport knows, the end of a hard day's work is signified by the redolent odour of sweaty bodies filling the carriages and buses of the city. To labour in Malaysia is to sweat whether we work white collar jobs or no-collar jobs, whether commuting to and from work or at work.

It may not smell good but this sweating labour keeps the electricity going, the water running, the roads in tolerable shape and supplies the food, entertainment, and the myriad other facilities which make everyday life manageable and meaningful for us. Yet it gets short shrift in popular discourse.

There are reasons for this, and these are both political and economic.

From the newspapers and TV news, we may come away with the impression that the two most important components of Malaysia's political economy are the politicians and the corporate sector.

We can read exhausting accounts of ministerial 'labour' everyday since the government likes to cultivate the impression that its ministers are essential to everyday life, that the country and the economy would fall apart without them. Yet what about the labour of the entire civil service machinery the people who really run and maintain the ship of state?

The corporate sector is the typical economic focus. Here the effacement of labour is even more stark. Corporations and enterprises at their simplest are their labour, the management, the owners, and the means of production, but the 'business' section of the news excludes labour.

Businessmen and datuks; they don't sweat at work. They do it outside of work at golf clubs or on the squash court. Sweating for them is a consequence of sport or a way to avoid heart disease. Sweat is a by-product of luxury, not labouring to live.

In a capitalist economy it becomes important to disavow the full contribution of labour to capital growth. This is because the basic wage-labour relation is based upon an unequal exchange which forms the basis of profit.

When Benjamin Franklin said that 'time is money' he got it the wrong way round; under capitalism money is time. The regulation and exploitation of labour time is the central characteristic of capitalism.

The exchange of commodities is in effect the exchange of labour time embodied in the former. The owners of capital attempt to extend the working day or work labour more intensively.

A worker sells her future labour potential, her labour power, for a stipulated payment to be at the disposal of a capitalist for a certain time. The wages she is paid are generally not equal to the value which she creates for the capitalist with her labour power.

If both wages and value created were equal, then the capitalist would derive no profit from her, notwithstanding the cost of other factors of production. So he uses his powers to induce more labour time or more intensive labour in order to extract greater value, or surplus, from the worker.

The capitalist thus establishes himself in a parasitic, vampire-like, relation to the producers of value, the working class.

Capital also draws surplus from rent, interest, expropriation of the weak, and the creation of fictitious value. But the basis of capitalist profit in industrial societies is the unequal exchange, the economic exploitation, of waged labour.

The 'free' worker is forced to sell her labour power to the capitalists because the means of production or control of markets have been monopolised by them. Her options for survival outside the labour market are slim.

Wages become a way for her to purchase the means of life. This is the truth of our modern society which needs to be whitewashed in order for the demands of the working class to be frustrated and the owners of capital to sustain their vampirism.

Labour in turn struggles for limits to the working day, better working conditions, the right to associate and organise in order to pursue these demands. It struggles for the full recognition of its value.

Labour struggles to have the means to life and the time in which to live. Work becomes a prison where one has to serve time. The precious few hours of daily life left after one has cleared the hurdles of commuter gridlock are often consumed in the attempt to remedy the stress of work. Occupation related health problems further sap our limited vitality.

The result is that work for most is a drudgery, a tedium, a boredom, sometimes filled with anxiety and fear if the tasks are hazardous. The mistake of many socialists was to glorify work, to elevate it to an ideal.

Taken to its logical conclusion and married to the obsession with out-producing capitalism, this idealism led to the horror of the factory societies of the Soviet world. The republic which was intended to liberate the working class ended up enslaving it to an ideal of itself.

The goal should rather be to transcend the role of subordinated workers and become a society that would fulfil everyone's needs but no one's greed. A parallel example is that the elimination of the coloniser opens the way for the colonised to transcend their oppressed condition.

This is a political, economic and cultural struggle for recognition, justice and respect. An important precondition for respect is visibility in order to be recognised. The suppression of the exploitation of labour from our popular culture is a consequence of the relative success of capitalists in their struggle against labour.

One important way in which workers try to recapture visibility and dignity is the May Day rally. In a short article on its origins, historian Eric Hobsbawm writes that May Day is a holiday which has its origins not in the power of governments, conquerors or religions, but in 'an entirely unofficial movement of poor men and women'.

It was first celebrated on May 1, 1890. The Marxist Second International had called for a day of action the year before when it met in Paris to celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution.

The idea behind May Day was to have an international demonstration by workers on the same day, when they would demand a 'Legal Eight-Hour Day' before the public and other authorities. The 'standard' eight-hour working day which we take for granted today owes part of its legacy to these May Day protests and the movements which held them.

Through the use of coordinated organisation and mass, the workers of the world have used May Day to make a symbolic demonstration of force.

Demonstrations are apparently appeals for change directed towards a state or other authorities. Yet, as John Berger has written, '... if the state authority is open to democratic influence, the demonstration will hardly be necessary; if it is not, it is unlikely to be influenced by an empty show of force containing no real threat.'

His belief is that 'mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness.'

The mass demonstration is an opportunity for the demonstrators to gauge their potential strength, to strengthen their belief by experiencing each other collectively. Thus 'the mass demonstration simultaneously extends and gives body to an abstraction. Those who take part become more positively aware that they belong to a class.

"Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity. They begin to recognise that the function of their class need no longer be limited; that it, too, like the demonstration itself, can create its own functions."

This recognition of potential and the growing awareness of the power needed to realise it plays a critical role in any mass struggle for justice. Our lives are measured in units of time, and workers are forced to sell their time, their lives, in an exchange with capital for which they are never fairly compensated.

Repressive laws, police power, and state repression are mobilised to sustain this relationship. Conflict is fostered amongst workers to divide them within nations and between nations. The reality of this is disguised under all manner of racial, religious or ideological confusion.

The rich lecture to the workers that this system of relations is natural, optimal, and bearable. For most it is anything but; we want more life.

When this need has reached a point so great that not to realise it means not to live, or to live a half-existence, then rehearsals are no longer necessary. 'The next stage', writes Berger, 'is training in tactics and strategy for the performance itself.'

On May Day workers gather to inject a disruptive sliver of reality into the fiction which structures our industrial society. The working class move from invisibility to visibility - whether raw, sweat-soaked, or exhausted by the daily struggle - they move to claim their right to a full humanity.